My hero: Jhumpa Lahiri and Michael Ondaatje on Mavis Gallant

Two prizewinning writers pay tribute to a unique author who embraced darkness and compassion as well as humour and light: The Guardian

Jhumpa Lahiri on Gallant: I discovered Mavis Gallant thanks to a writer friend in the mid-90s when I was just starting out writing short stories. I felt she had taken the form above and beyond what I thought it could do. She turned it on its head. I felt a great freedom when reading her, because even though her work is mainly short stories, they are their own genre in a way; they are so much richer, so much denser than so many novels. If you just read the opening two pages of some of her stories you are inundated with details, material, interior life, coming at full throttle, yet it is all very clear and one is able to follow and enter into these worlds that she creates.